Sara Wilson is a recognized authority on GenZ, digital trends, and building online communities
The big social media platforms that have dominated everyday life for a generation are now becoming a giant melting glacier.
Slowly, silently, almost imperceptibly people are drifting away from those platforms to seek refuge in more private social spaces where they can have closed door conversations out of earshot from everyone except those they trust the most.
The era of “performative sharing” – of calling attention to even the most banal moments in your life – of waiting anxiously to see how many “likes” you got – may finally, mercifully, be coming to an end.
People are suffering from social fatigue. From the barrage of meddlesome posts inserted into their feeds from brands and influencers. From toxic content that stirs up negativity and indignation. From the feeling that Big Brother is looking over their shoulder.
Yet most people still want to connect online with friends, with friends of friends, with their social circle. They are driven by the tribal instinct to “belong”. Instead of showing off in front of people, they are choosing to gather in closed niche communities where they can be more themselves. A place where they can chat openly with like-minded people who share their values, their interests, their lifestyle, their passion points, and yes, their world view, without fear of being judged or mocked.
GenZ is leading the way. Their preferred method of communicating with their closest friends is by far DM messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram. And an estimated one fifth of GenZers now use the micro-community platform Discord which has over 200 million active users worldwide and 7 million servers that host a diverse range of communities. Users connect through text, voice, and video and spend on average four hours a week on the platform just hanging out.
This shift in social media habits has begun to wall off brands from a coveted demographic cohort. Whereas Facebook has always been a low-cost way to reach a target audience (and remains so), brands are beginning to realize that they have to find another way to connect with people or eventually be shut out of their digital lives. The answer, for many brands, has been to build communities of their own from scratch. According to one study, 80% of businesses report having a community program of some kind, if for no other reason than to provide customer support. But the brands that have been most successful at community building – that have built vibrant, engaged, devoted communities – have done so as part of a broader relationship building strategy.
Look at Salesforce with its massive Trailblazer Community – Sephora with its Beauty Insider program – LEGO Ideas which counts on the enthusiasm of their fans to come up with new product ideas – or at any of the activity-related communities like Peloton Facebook Groups, Nike’s Run Club, and Lululemon’s Member program, to name just a few.
Of course those brands have the marketing savvy and budget to invest in building a passionate fanbase. They are careful to earn the trust of community members. They allow engagement between members to grow organically. They give the program room to breathe, having won the support of upper management. Which is why many communities start small and stay that way – just too many hurdles to overcome with too few resources.
An easier approach, suggests community evangelist Sara Wilson, is to show up in the communities where your target audience is already gathering, whether that’s group chats, forums, sub-reddits, or private Discord servers. Sara has memorably and famously dubbed them “digital campfires”, meaning intimate settings where people go to hang out. But in order for brands to join those conversations, they first need to be seen as partners, not interlopers, as creative contributors, not promoters, as event collaborators, not just sponsors. Tough to do for most brands, trained to hunt, not to mingle.
Sara is a former journalist specializing in lifestyle and culture with a keen observant eye who tracks the evolving world of community building through her incisive Substack newsletter “Community Catalyst”. Her consultancy, SW Projects, specializes in helping brands adapt to a world where, as she puts it, “real purchasing decisions happen in the online rooms they’re not in”.
After a decade or so as a journalist, Sara joined Facebook in 2018 where she led strategic partnerships in the lifestyle category. I started by asking Sara what prompted her to veer off her chosen career path to join Facebook.
Sara Wilson (SW):: It’s funny, I don’t see it as different. I’ve always been really interested and attracted to being where conversations are happening. So I started my career in magazines and newspapers. At the time, the Zeitgeist was really firmly in print, right? In magazines, in newspapers, people were having conversations that often originated there, started there. So I was really excited about being there. Then that shifted to digital media. So that’s when, about 2010, I went to Huffington Post because I saw that conversation shifting to digital media. And then the same thing happened in 2013 and I saw that conversation shifting to social. So it really wasn’t different. It was more where are conversations happening and how is that evolving and how can I chase that?
And so that’s how I ended up at Facebook, Instagram and, and it was a really interesting time when I joined the company. You know, it was still, it wasn’t quite a startup, but it wasn’t quite a big company yet. So it was at this really wonderful inflection point. The company Facebook had just bought Instagram about a year earlier and it was still largely untapped in terms of what are we going to do with it. And so I got to really have that app as a playground of sorts to really experiment and figure out how to build a culture-first brand and drive growth with, you know, tapping into culture. So that was really an unbelievable opportunity.
Stephen Shaw (SS):: Now your background was journalism…
SW: Yes.
SS: …as we spoke about, but no marketing experience as far as I can tell.
SW: Mmhmm.
SS: Was that all new to you as well, this brand new world of digital marketing, Facebook marketing?